The concept of the Internet has been expanding into a more mobile Internet through the use of radio cellular technologies. An Internet of Things (IoT) is what some people envision to connect billions of physical or virtual devices in the Internet cloud. This enables these devices to exchange information not only among themselves but with the environments and servers that provide services to benefit the devices and end users. Although this concept seems simple, there are significant challenges in wirelessly communicating with billions of objects.
Wireless mobile services have been mainly designed for human communications that include both human-to-human and human-to-server communications. Human communications can include many devices, such as personal computers (PCs), notebooks, tablets, and smartphones, and such devices provide similar interfaces and services to users (e.g. video, voice, and multimedia). Such devices can be connected to a wireless network. Connecting physical devices to a wireless network can be relatively time consuming, and computationally and energy intensive relative to the use of network resources once a connection has been established. However, people typically connect to wireless networks infrequently, and for extended periods of time, often from several minutes to several hours per connection. Accordingly, the time and energy spent connecting is minimized in the overall scheme.
In contrast, the machine-to machine (M2M) communication market is comprised of a variety of services ranging from telemetry (e.g. smart meter, remote monitoring), to telematics (e.g. fleet tracking), to surveillance video. These M2M services and similar types of services have very different usage schemes. The devices can be configured to connect to a wireless network, upload information, and disconnect. The devices can connect more often, and for shorter periods of time than is typical with human communication.
In the example situation of a utility monitoring device, there may be a large group of wireless utility monitoring devices (e.g., 100-1000 devices) that may transmit information to a server within a short period of time.
In some situations, devices do not communicate as intended. When this occurs, a machine type communication (MTC) server may seek to reconnect to the devices to instruct the devices to communicate with the server. The connection of a large number of devices within this short period can strain the resources of the wireless network.
Reference will now be made to the exemplary embodiments illustrated, and specific language will be used herein to describe the same. It will nevertheless be understood that no limitation of the scope of the invention is thereby intended.